Skip to main content
Margaret Simons on Muck Rack

Margaret Simons

As seen in: MSN Australia, MSN UK, Daily Mail, Nature, The Guardian, The Guardian Australia, Yahoo Canada, JSTOR Daily, SAGE Publishing, South China Morning Post and
Yoga-posin', ocean-swimmin', fiction-devourin', NPR-listenin', tech-curious Socialgiri co-founder

Get in touch with Margaret

Contact Margaret, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.

Learn more about Muck Rack

Actions

Share this page

Articles

The lichen and the damage done

|
By Margaret Simons
| The Saturday Paper Verified
The first rain for weeks is sweeping across the city and I am watching the lichen on the roof. It has been growing for years in the dips of the Colorbond. For a long while, I was quite pleased to see it. I thought of it as a reassuring confirmation of the persistence of life. How remarkable, even admirable, I thought, that this weird crusty, flaky looking thing should grow in acne-like clusters on metal – presumably feeding off nothing more than dust. Well done, lichen. It was pretty, in its way.
Open in Who Shared Issue with article?

Australians must demand that their cultural custodians uphold freedom of speech

|
By Margaret Simons
| Inkl
‘What do we mean by freedom of speech?’ Photograph: Jorm Sangsorn/Getty Images/iStockphoto Is there a way forward for Australia’s cultural life after the cancellation of the 2026 Adelaide writers’ week and all the other controversies played out over the past year, in which the custodians of our culture seem to have crumbled under pressure, only to kinda, sorta and belatedly rally?
Open in Who Shared View Duplicates (2) Issue with article?

How to keep being

|
By Margaret Simons
| The Saturday Paper Verified
I am 65 years old. That means I have seen a lot of pain. My own, but mostly that of others. I remember the Port Arthur massacre. Tiananmen Square. The London bombings. 9/11. The Christchurch massacre. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sudan. Rwanda. Gaza. I wasn’t present for these, other than in the modern mediated sense that brings us all into a kind of presence, a connection with each other. A variety of bearing witness. For most of human history, we would not have known so much about the suffering of others.
Open in Who Shared Issue with article?
See all 356 licensed articles (463 Total)